Back in July 2015, I signed up for Backblaze. I was going to use it to backup the bulk of my personal data stored on my Drobo. But the Drobo proved problematic with my Mac Mini. I cannot leave the Drobo mounted on the Mac Mini. I used to get "device improperly dismounted" errors, until a firmware upgrade. After that, it won't improperly dismount it, but it will silently make it read-only, and it will then crash the Mac Mini. I originally blamed the Mac Mini, which had some stability problems. I had the motherboard replaced in the Mac Mini, but that changed nothing with the Drobo. So I leave the Drobo dismounted but turned on. When I back up, I mount it, backup, then dismount. It's an ugly solution and I am not happy with Apple and Drobo over this mess. But it works and lets me back things up to the Drobo on a regular basis.

But Backblaze was doing nothing. Not good. Waste of money. So I thought about it and realized that the Mac Mini had a 500 gig hard drive doing nothing except run the operating system. I don't use the Mac Mini for anything except hosting the Drobo. So I created a directory on the Mac Mini internal drive and started regular backups of my Linux desktop to there. Then I turned on Backblaze for the third or fourth time, transferred the license to the Mac Mini and got it to start backing up the Mini and that backup directory. It started. 275,000 files to backup. What? I have a lot of photos, and a lot of email and a lot of notes, but I didn't think I had that many files. But if I go to that directory and type

find . | wc -l

I get 275,238 files. Well. Guess so. I left BackBlaze running. After six weeks, it's still slowly backing up. 44,000 files left to go. It should finish the initial backup by the end of January, I hope. I keep topping it up with regular backups.

I see that Backblaze has an iPhone and iPad app. It's pretty neat. I can access my backed up files remotely via the iPhone and iPad. That's acting a bit like Dropbox and ownCloud. I like that.